Survival Skills – What’s that all about, then?

Most will associate ‘Survival Skills’ with the ability to use skills, knowledge and techniques to continue living in an environment where ‘disaster’ has struck. There is an idea that a situation where a person is placed in an environment devoid of the conveniences of modern living, is a ‘disaster’. How odd. Odd, because living in a world without mod-cons is exactly what our (fairly recent) forbears did – and some continue to do all over this Planet! However, on the whole, our skills, knowledge and capacity to live without modern conveniences is often very rusty at best, or completely lost.

Survival Skills, then, are the skills, knowledge and mental attitudes that we apply to provide for ourselves the necessities to live.

Survival Skills are transferable and can have beneficial relevance, applicability and utility in all ways, walks and times of life. Learnt in any context or environment, Survival Skills help us live our daily lives in a more sympathetic and connected, more primitive yet somehow more sophisticated manner. We re-acquire the capacity to look and see; we develop our ability to listen and hear; we learn to innovate and improvise to provide what is necessary; we become skilled in fashioning and implementing to meet our needs; we become adept in recognising problems and their solutions; we get to define, recognise and achieve success (and failure!); we exercise responsibility and experience consequences; and we enhance our physical and mental resilience and robustness.

So acquire and practice your Survival Skills in an Urban, Jungle, Sea, Littoral, Desert, Arctic, Antarctic or temperate context. What have you got to lose? (Except the ability to survive and thrive?)